Mamie Till-Bradley and her family knew none of this, having been told only that Louis had been killed for "willful misconduct". Like no other event in modern history, the death of Emmett Till provoked people all over the United States to seek social change.

At the same time, I go back to the way he died, how he suffered, the screaming, the beating, and it makes me think: Was the pleasure worth the strain, to have all these bills and things named after him? However, the tape recordings that Tyson made of the interviews with Bryant do not contain Bryant saying this.I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. In a separate section, Anderson looks at how the story of Till's death reemerged after 50 years and sparked an intense investigation, including the exhumation of Till's body.

According to historians Davis Houck and Matthew Grindy, "Louis Till became a most important rhetorical pawn in the high-stakes game of north versus south, black versus white, NAACP versus White Citizens' Councils". Her decision focused attention on not only American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy".Wright said "I think [Emmett] wanted to get a laugh out of us or something," adding, "He was always joking around, and it was hard to tell when he was serious. And then, he boasted to her that he had had sex “with white women before,” although she claimed he used an unprintable word to describe “sex. In “A Few Days of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till,” the Rev. Reed, who later changed his name to Willie Louis to avoid being found, continued to live in the Chicago area until his death on July 18, 2013. On September 23 the all-white, all-male jury (both women and blacks had been banned) [113] acquitted both defendants after a 67-minute deliberation; one juror said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long.